Corporate Advocacy Program: The best way to manage and repair your business reputation. Hiding negative complaints is only a Band-Aid. Consumers want to see how businesses take care of business. All businesses will get complaints. How those businesses take care of those complaints is what separates good businesses from bad businesses.

Ike: Upon entering your store I asked your employee for one bottle of water but I decided that I wanted two. He said I could get two even though I brought one bottle with me.

He said that I could bring the bottle back later. After this agreement I went inside to share what we agreed on and to pay. The inside person disagreed with what the outside person and I agreed on.

1. Poor business practices: Conflicting agreements with both employees, which leaves customer in-between. I didnt complain. Inside employee said that we need those bottles. I said to him, Ill bring it back. I live right in Oceana. If thats a problem, just give me one bottle of water and well just forget it. Then he asked me whats my name? I told him. He said ok, hold on, Let me call and see whats the deal with you. I said, see whats the deal! What kind of deal.

Ain't no deal with me. He called you, Ike, and asked whats the deal and yal talked. I dont know what was said, but I believe it was what you and I had already discussed a time ago. At some point of the conversation, on the phone, I asked to talk to you so that I could explain what happened. I told you what he said and how he approached what he said. His actions were that there was some kind of problem with him concerning me, and we had no conversation about anything that was a problem. While you shared with me, again, what you and I discussed before, over the phone, he acted as if he had something against me, because of his behavior.

2. He said to me, Youre not making no progress! Youre wasting my time! He could not hear what you were sharing with me and I dont think that you and I had a disagreement on the phone, where we couldnt reason. So his coming between us, while after all, you are a business owner, to control the conversation that you and I were involved in, that was disrespectful and offensive to me. I didnt complain. He acted like he was going to take the phone out of my hand, so I mentioned it to you that I cant talk to you no more right now because he said, Im wasting his time and was reaching to take the phone from me. You allowed him to have his way. That wasnt a way to treat a customer.

3. Then the employee said to me, I didnt want to do no business with you. Why all the negative approaches, when I didnt say anything negative to start the problems? I noticed that the negative behavior started once he asked me my name. I feel that if there was any problem he had with me or my name, that should have been settled before I was re-instated to receive service from your company. How do you think that I am suppose to feel as a customer, to come do business with you and I didnt cause a problem during that visit, to start with, but I am being picked at and picked at, nagged and not appreciated for my business? After all, you said that people are human, being that the errors were made with the payments. I said that I would over-look it when it happens again. But, whatever it was that bothered him so bad, about me, he couldnt find no peace in himself to overlook it. So, for that cause, he began to pick and attack the moment that I stepped in the door and found out my name. It was alright for him to dislike me for whatever reason, but he didnt have to treat me wrong and disrespect me. The way he behaved, since I came in the door, I hadnt disrespected him, he was wrong! Whether you and he wants to accept it or not. Because of all of this, I told him to kiss my rear, even though I used another word. Then he asked me did I want a bullet in my head! Which was a threat! He reach toward his drawers as if he was gonna pull something out of it. I took it to mean, to harm me, which was a threat of gesture! I made two or three steps forward to look and see what he was pulling out of his desk. He looked up quickly at me with this extreme grin that I took, surmountably serious. I said to him, You white cracker. I normally dont talk that way, but since he disrespected me over and over again, and the only reason that I could think of for him to treat me that way, since I hadnt done anything to him to cause his behavior, it felt racist to me. And, I wanted him to feel what it felt like, for something to be racist to him. Thats the only reason that I called him white cracker. I felt, at that time, all this hurt and mistreatment, until my anger and my vocabulary was distorted. After all of this provocative treatment, he jumped up out of his seat in a rush, came up to me, after that I had kicked the little plastic trash can over, and he yelled, Get out of my store! I didnt turn away from him quickly to leave, so he would not attack me from behind. Once I saw that he wasnt going to make an attempt to attack me physically, I left the office and I noticed that the bottle that I brought with me was left on the inside and I went to the employee outside, reached in, got a bottle, told him that we had a disagreement and I got one. He said ok! As I was leaving the office, the office person picked up the phone to dial out, but he quickly came out and added more fire to the situation by asking me, Is that your bottle? Then proceeding to ask me why did I make the racial response. Evidently, he didnt realize how things that are said and how people are treated, when there is no clear explanation, how they can be perceived. I replied to him, You started it, and you made the problem and thats why I said what I did say. And, I told him again, You kiss my back side. (but I used the other word) Since you were an employer, as he was, but didnt have a fall out as we did, and had heard the heated portion of our disagreement, but not the early part of it, when I first entered the store, which was added to and added to and soon escalated to a problem, I decided, when I returned home, to call you and ask how did you want to resolve this. Do you think we can talk about this and resolve this ourselves? If so, Im for it. If you dont think we can, I can resolve it with the media. You didnt respond to the questions I asked you, you just went straight to the negative, saying (I dont care if you take to the media). This didnt show any willful effort to resolve the big mess that we were in, as a courtesy to your customer. After all, he started it. But, I understand that you were being bias and blind, on one side of the problem
because he was like a father to you. (Even though, I didnt want to resolve it with the media, I wanted to resolve it by talking it through, by being honest and fair and laying all of the true mishaps by both parties on the table and straightening the entire matter out.) If one of us injured an arm, why have it cut off if there might be a possibility to save it? In other words, because your partner had a problem with me why cut me off? Is it because if you handled it by asking your partner to revisit that moment in his head and pick-out what wasnt good business practice, bring it to the table and take responsibility for it, that would be a strain on your partnership? Was it because it would be easier to make the customer pay the consequences to dump customer after customer because theres a problem in the business that you dont want to deal with? That doesnt fix the problem but says its ok to continue to do evil. After all he provoked it. I also see how it could be a difficult situation to have someone you look-up to, be partly wrong by provoking a problem that causes another to go wrong. To have a father or someone to look up to as a father, even if it is my father he is not exempt from error or wrong and to attack me or to make an attempt to correct me over the phone for what I in anger said to your partner and not say one word about his most in fault behavior makes me think that his evil counts less against him than my evil counts against me.

Regardless of who a person is me, you or my mother or wife if any of us are wrong, we are at fault and to accept that truth is the beginning of clear sight. Also concerning the mailed balance to my residence, I tried to share with you how it affected me after the second time. You didnt tell me that you were going to pass the phone to another person. You passed it over and they just ignored what I was saying and over looked poor public relations practices by forcing me into their choice of direction instead of confronting first things first. If you were selling me a car and we were successful half way through the sale and then you just walked away and sent someone back in your place that may put a break in trust and confidence because whatever the reason for leaving, there were no explanation. If you were in the field you could have said you were in the middle of a situation and we could clear up everything later and when maybe we could get together. If that wasnt possible it would make me think my money is important but not me. This is my position on the matter, we all can talk about this and set things straight, because I consider us all to be intelligent adults. If you choose not to, you cant say I didnt try to bring a reasonable conclusion to this matter before stone-walling the situation.

The problem didn't originate with you, Ike, but your "part-owner", and it was wrong to pass all of the guilt on to your customer

Corporate Advocacy Program: The best way to manage and repair your business reputation. Hiding negative complaints is only a Band-Aid. Consumers want to see how businesses take care of business. All businesses will get complaints. How those businesses take care of those complaints is what separates good businesses from bad businesses.